Fear of Dying (5 page)

“So I see.”

“I'm very glad you came,” he says. Then there is a pause. We can't figure out what else to say.

“Will you tell me your real name?”

“Yes: David. And yours?”

“I'm not ready to tell you that.”

“So what should I call you?”

“Call me Serena. Perhaps it will have a magical effect.”

“I hope so. Tell me why you placed that ad. I'm really curious.”

“Well, I adore my husband, but he's much older, and people seem to be dying all around me.”

“Sex is very lacking and you miss it, right?”

I feel guilty even nodding, so I say and do nothing in response.

“Tell me about you,” I propose.

“My wife is ill. I'd feel like a cad if I left her, but my life is pretty bleak. I was hoping to banish the bleakness. I don't want to get involved with anyone who might know her or me, but I thought since I come to New York every so often.… So I saw the ad and thought I'd take the risk. I'm terrified actually.”

“Me too.” Was it possible we were perfect for each other?

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“Please.”

He calls the waiter and we order drinks—red wine for me, bourbon for him.

“You're beautiful,” he says, “and I'm sure I've seen you before.”

“Unlikely.”

“Why is it unlikely?”

“I've spent my whole life being an Upper East Side housewife,” I lie. I have no intention of identifying myself.

“Why is that bad?”

“In New York it's a crime never to have done anything with your life.”

“I'm sure you've done things with your life. You wouldn't look so alive if you hadn't.”

“Thank you. Do I really look alive? Some days I feel half dead.”

“Everyone should look so good dead.”

“What brings you to New York?”

“I'm raising money for my company, meeting with investment-fund managers, that sort of thing.”

“Men in suits?”

“Yes, and a few women in suits, but I don't want to talk about that. I can do those pitches in my sleep.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“What we came here for—fantasy.”

“Do you want to tell me yours?”

“I'd rather show you.”

“I'd rather get to know you first.”

“Often that ruins the fantasy.”

“I'll take that risk.”

“Look, why don't you come to my suite at the Palace—right down the block—and we'll talk there. I have a car waiting.”

I think about it. It puts me in a sweat. He is a total stranger, and the idea of sex with a total stranger terrifies me.

“But you're a total stranger.”

“Then get to know me.”

I battle with myself. At twenty, I would have been challenged, but now going to a hotel room with a strange man seems like the sheerest folly. Am I going to risk all the great things I have with Asher for a perfect stranger?

“My father is dying,” I say.

“All the more reason why you should live.”

“Look—you go to your suite and order lunch and maybe I'll join you there if I find the courage.” Am I ready for risk-taking or not? I used to be good at putting all the risks out of my head, but now I think about how much I have to lose.

“Good. Suite 2733.”

He leaves. I run to the ladies' room, pee, touch up my makeup, and run down the block to Madison Avenue before I can change my mind. Then I circle the block three times in a daze, debating with myself. Am I ready for adventure or not? The old dybbuk of impulsiveness comes back. I will go to his suite. What do I have to lose except everything?

When I get there, a waiter is laying out a spread of beluga caviar, smoked salmon, and Champagne. The suite is huge and sunny. David is grateful I have come. When the waiter leaves, he kisses me decorously on the cheek. His beard is scratchy.

“No strings,” he says, moving swiftly away.

We sit opposite each other at the table and toast in vintage Krug. He prepares me a toast point with caviar.

What am I doing here? I think in a panic. Nevertheless, we continue to make small talk as if we have just met at a cocktail party.

“All my life, I've dreamed of meeting a woman who shares my fantasies.”

“We all dream of that.”

“But some fantasies are more unusual than others.”

“I'm sure we're all pretty much the same in the fantasy department.”

“Not necessarily,” he says. Then he stares at me and continues, “Dare I?”

“Dare you what?”

“Dare I share with you?”

“I don't see why not.”

“Perhaps we should just have lunch and wait for my next visit.”

“Fine with me. I can't stay very long today anyway.”

“Oh—what the hell,” he says.

He gets up and goes into the bedroom of the suite. A few seconds pass. When he returns he is holding aloft a black rubber suit with zippers over the crotch and the breasts. He looks at once sheepish and mischievous. He raises his eyebrows in question as if he is channeling Jack Nicholson. His beard makes him look Mephistophelian when he works his eyebrows that way. “What do you think?”

“Do
you
wear it? Or do
I
?”

“You. And there are certain accessories that go with it.”

“Accessories?” My mind is blank. I don't think immediately of manacles and chains and whips, although the Marquis de Sade must have had such stuff at Lacoste—his ruined castle in the Luberon.

“You know,” he says. “Accessories.”

Then it dawns on me. He's thinking of gothic paraphernalia. My mind flies back to a time I played Sade's Justine, the twelve-year-old serving maid whose
virtu
is tested by nuns, monks, cavaliers,
comtes
—et cetera. Someone had adapted Sade's
Justine
into a filthy French movie.

Sade was a revolutionary, of course, with a revolutionary's detestation of the establishment. Did the monks preach virtue? Then he would preach sin. He was, we know, a member of the National Convention and hated hypocrisy as much as he hated its chief purveyor, the Catholic Church. For which he spent five years in the Bastille and thirteen years in Charenton, the insane asylum. Most of his books were written in jail—a terrific place for a libertine to write. Freedom, after all, is distracting.

In the only known portrait of him—done when he was twenty—he has such a sweet face. Jail may have saved his life in that bloody period when aristocrats were being guillotined. It certainly increased his literary output.

Oh, I had done S&M with the director of that movie—a certain Christian Fleuvier d'Anjou, who claimed to be a
comte
himself, descended from a distant cousin of Sade. It was a big bore to me—and dangerous to boot. Maybe the girls who'd never heard of “the Divine Marquis” or even
L'Histoire d'O
were turned on by it—especially if they got cash and prizes along with the stinging butt and reddened clit. But I much preferred soft lights and sweet music—tenderness, even if fake tenderness.

We all have our particular preferences. Mine is gentle sex, the kind in which a man takes forever before he touches you down there. But most people are so guilty about sex that they want the crime and the punishment built in.

“I think it's not my cup of tea,” I say softly.

“Oh, just try it on,” David pleads. “You never know till you try.”

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Nothing human is alien to me, but I don't want to wear that suit. God only knows what the matching headgear is. And I had already tried S&M—as a young actress—with a director who turned out to be a horse's ass. And violent besides.

“I think I know,” I say, getting up to go. “Thank you so much for the drink.”

“You bitch,” he hisses. “How could you lead me on like this?”

“I thought this was just
lunch
.”

“I thought you were
serious
.”

“I thought so too, but I never made any promises.”

He grabs my arm and squeezes it painfully. “I can get younger chicks than you.”

“I'm sure you can—let me go!”

“You're fifty if you're a day.”

“Thanks, I'll tell my plastic surgeon. I'm sure he'll be pleased.”

And somehow I make it to the door without his touching me again. I run to the elevator in a sweat. He doesn't follow. I descend to the lobby. I walk several blocks at a trot, always thinking there is a stretch limousine following me. My high heels clatter over the pavement. I am already out of breath.

How could you be so stupid? You know the world is full of crazy people who have learned how to temporarily hide their craziness. Scratch a lover and find a lunatic!
And then I flag down a cab and go to see my parents.

*   *   *

“I'm a hundred and ninety-three and half dead!” my father raves. “Same old story.”

Veronica has made him get up and sit at the table for tea and he is pissed off.

“What is the matter with your father?” my mother asks me.

“You married him, I didn't,” I say.

“But he is so grouchy,” she says. “He's never been this grouchy.”

I go and kiss my father on his head. “Same old story,” he says dismissively. “I know what you're here for.”

“What?”

“Money.”

“I am not. I don't want your money.”

“Bullshit,” my father says, and begins fiddling to turn off his hearing aid.

“Don't you
dare
turn off that hearing aid, Mr. Wonderman,” Veronica says. “Vanessa is here to see you.”

“What for? I'm half dead. I ought to jump out the window.” He gets up and walks toward the dining room window, but Veronica restrains him.

“You ought to count your blessings,” she says. “Look down the street at the homeless people. You got it good. You got to get you some gratitude.”

“Gratitude, platitude,” my father growls.

“At least he can still rhyme,” says my mother.

“Let me go back to bed!” my father screams. “I've been awake long enough!” He is Dylan Thomas raging against the dying of the light, Ivan Ilyich in his black sack.

“He sleeps all the time,” my mother says. “I don't understand it.”

In movies the dying have long, intense conversations before parting, but it's not like that in real life—or is it? My father escaped from my mother the only way he could. He was escaping from her in sleep as he had once escaped from her in work.

“I do,” I say. I have only been there five minutes and already I'm longing to leave.

I think of the rubber suit and suddenly begin to laugh.

“What are you laughing at?” my mother asks as my father is frog-marched down the hall to his bedroom, a prisoner in striped pajamas.

“Nothing.”

“Some nothing.
Tell
me.”

“I'm thinking that if we have to see the world as a tragedy or a comedy, we might as well see it as a comedy. It's more fun.”

“I agree with you,” my mother says. I long to tell her about the rubber suit. She would see the absurdity of it. Even in her present condition.

My phone vibrates then. I sneak a peek. It's from my swain with the rubber suit—or at least I think it is.

“You bitch!” he's texted; the creep now has my cell phone number.

“Are you happy, darling?” my mother suddenly asks. She has become as angelic as my father was demonic.

“Don't I look happy?” I ask.

“You look worried,” my mother says. “A mother can always tell.”

I go into the other room and call my friend Isadora. “I'm visiting my parents and I need a drink,” I say over the phone.

“That's the last thing you need. What's happening?”

“My parents are dying and I met a man who wants me to wear a rubber suit for him.”

Isadora breaks into gales of laughter. “I must have met him too once upon a time—or his twin brother. He'll do you as little good as a drink.”

“Come—meet me for coffee. We can compare notes.”

*   *   *

When Isadora bounces into the espresso place where we always meet, I'm struck again by her curly blond hair and big smile, as if she is thirty, not sixty. Seeing her makes me feel that getting older is not so terrible.

Isadora and I like to meet in a tiny coffee shop where the espresso is supposed to be the best in the city. It's a hole in the wall on the Upper East Side but the coffee is indeed extraordinary. We both order lattes.

“Rubber suit?” asks Isadora.

“Rubber suit,” I say.

“How do you know you wouldn't like it?”

“I know,” I say. “Have you ever worn one?”

“I refuse to answer on the grounds it might tend to incriminate me. I know that most people who have read my books think I've tried everything. I let them think so.”

“But it's not true?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you're just a nice Jewish girl pretending to be a sex fiend,” I say.

Isadora laughs. “At one point in my life I may have been a love junkie, but it taught me a lot—and I would never be fooled by a site like Zipless now—even though I named it. Sex on the Internet is much overrated.”

“Why?”

“Because most of the people drawn there are confusing fantasy with reality. They think they know what they want, but they don't.”

“What do they really want?”

“Connection. Slow sex in a fast world. You can't get that from a woman in a rubber suit. Or a man.”

I think about it. Isadora is right. We all want connection, and the velocity of our culture makes it harder and harder to find.

“What you really want,” my dear friend says, “is joy. Tell me when you find that—because you're looking for it in all the wrong places!”